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POMERANZ COLLECTION

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Untitled (Bicycle Shower)
2010
Bicycle, water pump, hose, watering can
Approx. 111 cm x 91 cm x 50 cm
In a custom-made metal box, approx. 140 cm x 125 cm x 50 cm
Edition 4/5
Inv. Nr. 137

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lives and works in New York City, New York, USA, Berlin, Germany, and Chiang Mai, Thailand

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an emblematic figure of a generation of artists who appeared in the 1990s and whose work was defined by French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud as “relational aesthetics,” a new paradigm based on interactivity. His practice deals with the creation of social situations and meeting areas in which the visitors are invited to interact and participate. In his living architectural spaces, one can talk, eat, play music or sleep inside the actual walls of the art institution. Tiravanija is very famous for his cooking interventions, during which he offers the Thai soup he has just prepared to anyone entering the art space. The shifting of situations and of mobility, more widely, are at the core of his work, renewing the recurring attempts of modern and contemporary art to merge art and life.

Tiravanija is also the President of The Land, once a rice field transformed in 1998 into an experimental space for ecological, social and educational matters, located near Chiang Mai in Thailand. Artists such as Philippe Parreno, Superflex, Tobias Rehberger, Alexandre Périgot or Alicia Framis, invited by Tiravanija, took part in the construction of the venue and produced site-specific projects. Untitled (Bicycle Shower) is part of a series of multiples referring to travelling, conceived by the Thai artist in The Land and manufactured by local workers. In it, the pedal of the bicycle activates a pump, which makes the water of this rudimentary shower run. In an absurd and very Dadaist way, the function and use of the object are subverted in favour of a very domestic and intimate act.